A Million Tiny Heartbreaks

You know that feeling when you’re on the precipice of a cliff, and you’re looking down, and up, and around, and you start to lose the ability to perceive scale, distance, or what the artists call perspective? Scientists call it vertigo. That sense of dizziness that happens when you can’t tell what’s close, what’s far, what’s big, what’s small, and the liquid in your eardrums responds to your perception of reality as if you’re falling.

There are so many heartbreaking results of coronavirus. The deaths. The canceled graduation ceremonies. The doctor parents who lose custody because they’re working long hours. The canceled conferences and new book tours. The kids who need the structure (or lunches) at school. The birthday parties suspended. The lifelines of socializing at nursing homes. The inability to access technology among those who need it the most, like grandma, or that kid in your class who has no internet. The most marginalized becoming even more marginalized because our country values money more than humanity.

A few heartbreaks from today: a sense of panic during the previously mundane activity of walking my dog at the beach. Going to the store. The plants dying in my abandoned office. My child’s sixth birthday celebrated alone. Seven zoom meetings where my beloved colleagues are all on the brink of tears, while my children fend for themselves. I forgot snack time.

The majority of my college students who, for reasons of sanity or perhaps disability, require face-to-face instruction and are now floundering in anxiety and depression, and cannot carry on “continuity of instruction,” much less eating and sleeping.

A million tiny heartbreaks spiral out from each other. That canceled birthday party turns into a canceled alternative at the zoo, which turns into a canceled alternative at the park, which turns into a canceled play date, which turns into a canceled birthday. Rites of passage, poof. Two of my cousins were supposed to get married in April. Both canceled. All of those seniors graduating. The mini-traumas of all those kids separated from their classes and teachers, never going to finish the grade they were in, wondering if they’ll be held back. Proms, tests, afterschool Lord of the Flies daycare, and all those other signs of humanity’s inability to be humane-- canceled. And yeah, it feels weird to be nostalgic about even those things, but it’s because I can feel the anxiety it is producing in all of the young people about how unstable life really is, even if they hate those things.

Shock doctrine is happening across the land with higher education. The precarity of a year ago feels quaint now, compared to the current attack on quality education. Faculty, staff, face-to-face classes are all “fat” that needs to get cut, so that higher education can regain its credibility in the current anti-intellectual climate. COVID is the perfect excuse. But wherefore administrator salary cuts?  When pigs fly.

All those million tiny heartbreaks of all those students across the land, going online, losing their contact with peers, campus staff, and faculty, wondering whether next semester will be the same, wondering whether a degree in anything matters anyway. My colleagues whose jobs are contingent upon a working visa or their health; the precariousness of it all is earth-shatteringly stark now. All the million tiny aftershocks—heartbreaking.

On the news: that cancer patient’s life is shortened by not receiving “inessential” medical treatment during this time. A high school senior’s athletic career has just been upended by this blip of history. A woman whose home life is abusive now has to spend all…day…long…. at home. Elderly people rely on social lifelines; their weekly bridge sessions and caregiver visitations-- canceled.

The fact that we’re talking about end-of-life plans with our 10-year-olds, and explaining to our 3-year olds the purpose of wearing masks in public—incomprehensible madness. The thousands of our loved ones, dying. ALONE. DYING ALONE.

A million tiny heartbreaks are making me dizzy. I can’t tell whether the fact that my children won’t see their teacher again is equivalent to my grandma never seeing any family member ever again, and whether that’s equivalent to the fact that 22 million people are unemployed, and that people are lining up by the hundreds for food. FOOD. Which is worse? My missed book talks or my kid’s extroversion being traumatically thwarted, or the homeless in my community not eating, or abortion rights getting chopped in the deal, or the fact that I can’t take a break from cooking anymore, or that COVID is being embraced by some as evidence of the rapture? The refrigerated morgue trucks lined up outside the New York City hospitals to hold the dead, or turning a whole generation of children into misanthropic germaphobes?

We are all sacrificing so much, even if it’s just time alone. Scale out from there, and we’re sacrificing our professional lives, our achievements we’ve worked hard on, the minimal benefits the state thinks we deserve, our domestic relationships, our physical health, our values around family and religion, our faith in institutions, our faith in leadership.

I’ll never forget the moment in all of this when the thought first occurred to me that I might not see my mom again. Remember that moment? We’ve all had it by now. The proximity of this threat encroached day by day, closer and closer. Scaling in, dizzying, like those strobe light that cause seizures. Even though I know nobody who has died, I’ve absorbed a million tiny heartbreaks—relationships crumbling under the pressure, hard-won collegiality fizzling in the moment of stress, my thirty non-graduating college seniors, and all those kids becoming accustomed to the “new normal” of isolation and wondering if they’ll ever see their grandparents again.

What about the real suffering, you ask? The ways this crisis is exposing the inequalities that already exist? The ways that the virus is affecting incarcerated people, detained migrants, the homeless, disabled, and people in countries with even worse medical infrastructure and effective leadership? YES. A million times a million times a million huge heartbreaks. Bring on the vertigo. One of my dear friends has stage four metastatic breast cancer, and COVID is making it hard for her to get her treatments, potentially shortening her life, not to mention her compromised immune system and the feeling of having a contamination target on her back.

People may say it’s a time to be humane, compassionate, our best selves. Meanwhile, companies, universities, and other employers are using shock doctrine to streamline and consolidate resources in the name of “innovation”, “synergy”, and of course, as if it even needs to be breathed, “efficiency.” Call it what it is- the privatization of the university to produce employable workforces in a neoliberal market economy. The structuralizing of disposable and precarious employees.

Woe is me, an academic, I know, but if it’s happening in the academy, you can bet it’s even worse elsewhere. It’s all over the news. Carnage. As of today, 22 million people have filed for unemployment. Twenty-two million heartbreaks are ripples in the pond, and we will all feel them vibrating through our communities, wallets, hearts, lungs, schools, favorite restaurants, hobbies, churches, and habits. We will feel them as a million tiny heartbreaks, and no small amount of really, really big ones.